The ways in volleyball and basketball that hand touches — high fives, low fives, fist bumps, etc. — maintain an energetic and affective flow throughout an athletic context, during play as well as during stoppages: congratulating, rewarding, acknowledging, affirming, but also dissipating sad passions, situational failures, and the like.

The difference between the two is largely structural: volleyball centralizes and ritualizes the hand touches, with all 6 players on the floor coming together after each point for a group exchange that appears quite indifferent to whether a point was scored or surrendered. In basketball, meanwhile, the hand touches are more distributed through the 5-player system as multiple haptic relays and switches, one player high-fiving another one here, another over there, and yet again; the energy staying on the move, diffuse, leaking into defensive transition opportunities and brief game stoppages as an occurrent "computational art" based on physical proximity, tempo, context, and event.

4. Dehabituated rhythms and changed or differential spatial parameters offer an invitation for novel gestural responses to the artwork.

5. When movement moves its way into the "aesthetic experience" proper, it continues to want to move, this time with the artwork, co-composing with it, contouring and creating with it.

6. It is not so much fatigue that one initially notices upon arrival at an artwork, but rather an interference of rhythms between runner and work, which thereafter gradually begin to harmonize or compromise. These resonances are of immediate interest in an aesthetico-ethical sense.

7. Habit can have unrefined pathways; one of these concerns its tempo.

8. Bodies are not "ideal", and thus neither should goals be. We understand these both in an affirmative sense.

9. The outwardly prosthetic body only makes evident and explicit the co-composition of all bodies.

10. A familiar gesture, machined differently, can be more more useful than a complex gesture known only to a few.

11. We are describing here an unhygienic experience (sweat, snot, traffic, noise, topography). Which is also in some ways to remind that we have been removed from the laboratory.

12. Speed only demands a greater adeptness with contingency and the aesthetics of failure.

13. There are both inner and outer accelerations that need to be considered in developing and evaluating the program.

14. If one seeks to create a nuclear or exponential energy field, one cannot initiate the reaction at maximum capacity. Rather, the intensity must be slowly increased to avoid the risk of rupture in a very real material sense.

15. The event itself is a collective enunciation — of gesture and energy. But so long as we remain bound to the particulars of language and its transmission, this collective enunciation must retain a spoken or written dimension as well. Breath must become metric rather than simply serving to inspire and expire.

16. Theses are exhausted and replenished much like mitochondrial reactors and muscular fibres. To elaborate: they, too, have relative catalytic points, elasticities and failure thresholds in the generation of things. And they, too, may also become fuel or worm food for future becomings . . .

"[Pete] Axthelm's phrase 'unique communal excitement' is perfect. It captures the social aspect of basketball and why many of us love the sport. Plays like Ginobili's between-the-legs pass or Parker's U-turn remind us of the best times we've had on a court, when for a half or a quarter or even one possession, we entered mind-meld territory with our teammates, executed pretty give-and-go handoffs, and spun off defenders to catch lob passes and finish them for layups. For 99 percent of us, nothing we have ever done on a basketball court remotely compares to what Parker and Ginobili do, but we have felt something close to what they're feeling on those perfect possessions. That emotional charge you get when you and four teammates are truly clicking — it scales down to your playground or your YMCA or your high school gym. The Spurs don't just achieve the sublime; they allow us to share in it" (emphasis added).

on the surface it seems profoundly anti-"ecological" (to use a term floating around right now) to go wholesale into an acceleration: ecologies are more profoundly periods of stillness mixed with accelerations. the latter are very traumatic, especially when considered intensively — childbirth is an acceleration of sorts, in which the "speed" and "distance" involved don't seem like much, and yet are extremely traumatic in both material and psychic senses (and we could include the traumas of other accelerations, such as returning from space travel, car accidents, the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. etc.).

what sort of ruptures, tears and detachments would be implied in an accelerationism at the planetary level?

before this technical infrastructure was "turned on", so to speak, i'd love to know more about the ontological, epistemological and ethical problems entailed — for example, collaborative decision-making which is shot through by speed and its intensified fragmentation of part-knowledges and part-subjects.

since it wouldn't be animals, rocks or other "objects" creating these technical infrastructures it seems fair to ask these questions even if they seem a little "humanist" in the process.

in the meantime, can we start more simply by "training" for an accelerationist world, not unlike how a world-class sprinter would do: by dialing up tempo and intensity incrementally, learning how to endure, speeding up and slowing down "schizostrategically" (to use joseph's term), allowing traumas (muscular, psychic, relational) to heal more readily, all while preparing for the "big race" — even if we don't know what or when said race is, or if it is for a people to come?

__________

(thoughts that have been gestating for a while, and which have only "accelerated" since reading nick srnicek and alex williams' #accelerate manifesto and mckenzie wark's response a few weeks ago.)

Place arises from a dynamic of interference and accord between sense-dimensions.

Brian Massumi

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

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sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.